Profile

In July 2013, I was awarded a PhD degree in Mathematics by the Complutense University of Madrid (Spain). During September 2013 - September 2016, I was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Mathematical Biology and Medicine Group at the University of Leeds, as part of a project funded by The Leverhulme Trust about stochastic modelling of molecular interactions.

Nowadays, I am an MRC Fellow & Lecturer in the Department of Applied Mathematics of the School of Mathematics at the University of Leeds. I am also a member of the Stochastic Modelling Group at the Complutense University of Madrid, where I develop stochastic models in Epidemiology, Immunology and in general in Health & Disease.

Research interests

My research interests range from Cell Biology (how cells react to their extracellular environment by means of proteins attached to their surface), to Mathematical Immunology (modelling the Immune response against pathogens such as virus and bacteria) and Mathematical Epidemiology (the mathematical modelling of the spread of infection among individuals in a population). For these systems, I mainly focus on stochastic approaches that allow to account for randomness, and more specifically I am an expert in the application of continuous-time Markov chains in these settings.

I am currently the Principal Investigator for the Medical Research Council funded project "Mathematical modelling of the emergence and spread of antibiotic resistant bacteria in healthcare settings: a stochastic approach". In this project, the main aim is to develop new stochastic models (and new mathematical tools for analysing them) regarding the spread of bacteria in hospital settings. Our aim is to identify the most probable routes of bacterial spread in these settings, and to identify the most effective control strategies that can be applied, by using clinical/experimental data and Bayesian statistical techniques for parameter estimation.